Blowhards Too Fat To Fight Barack?

What has happened to the famous American spirit? Where are all the baseball-bat wielding mobs of lean and hungry-looking rednecks immortalised by 1960’s news footage?

Throughout the Clinton years, wild-eyed survivalists in reinforced arsenals were all the rage, threatening dire consequences if the dictator Clinton dared improve social health care. They even killed hundreds of Americans in Oklahoma to make their point. Throughout the election campaign and as recently as yesterday, nasty words were being thrown about Obama. He is a Marxist Nazi, apparently. People have been arrested for plotting to kill him. Gun sales in parts of the south went up in anticipation of an Obama defeat and the subsequent riots. So the paranoid diehards haven’t gone away. Or should that be ‘blowhards’?

Quite possibly, if the statistics on US obesity are to be believed. In key anti-Obama states Mississippi Alabama and West Virginia, obesity is some of the worst in America. With the worst will in the world, it’s hard to imagine the current generation of good ol’ boys running a koala bear out of town, let alone a civil rights demonstration. And it would be cruel to make them.

So is the industrial food industry to be thanked for the conspicuous absence of any public hostility to a black man in the white House, rather than any change of heart? There is a war of words but no action. More a Fatlash than a Backlash. Governor Faubus is spinning in his grave. Meanwhile, his political opposite in many ways, George Orwell, is vindicated again.